Positions, Saliencies and Careers: Explaining ministerial selection in Sweden and the Netherlands

Controlling relevant ministries is one of the crucial links between party policy and government actions in European coalition governance and one of the prime goals for political parties to achieve in the political process. The literature on coalition formation has reflected this by showing an extensive interest in quantitative portfolio allocation—that is, the question which party gets how many ministerial portfolios in coalition bargaining processes. More recently, the literature has also moved towards looking at qualitative portfolio allocation—that is, asking “who gets what and why?” in terms of ministerial remits. This paper ties into the latter research interest by looking at the same question from a ministerial selection perspective: More specifically, the paper aims at elaborating whom government parties select as their ministers, taking intraparty politics into account. Based on models of portfolio allocation and previous findings we argue that Ministers are selected on the basis offor a) the positions they have previously taken in the relevant policy fields and b) the saliency these fields have had in their parliamentary work. To evaluate these expectations we draw on a novel and longitudinal data set covering MPs’ plenary speeches and their background information in Sweden and the Netherlands. First results indicate that both, previous policy field saliences and positions of MPs, add explanatory power to models explaining ministerial selection.